The Keeper of Lost Causes (3 page)

“There’s not much outside the house for the crime-scene techs to go on,” said Anker, jabbing his foot at the ground, which was soft and sludgy after the rain the night before.

Carl looked around. Aside from the marks left by the neighbor’s wooden clogs, there weren’t many footprints around the barracks building, which was one of those that the military had sold off in the sixties. Back then the barracks had all probably looked great, but by now, for this particular building at any rate, those days were over. The rafters had fallen in, the tar paper on the roof was riddled with holes, not a single plank on the facade was still in one piece, and the dampness had done its job. Even the sign, on which the name “Georg Madsen” had been printed with a black marker, was half rotted off. And then there was the stench of the dead man, seeping out through the cracks. All in all, a real shithouse.

“I’ll go and talk to the neighbor,” Anker said, turning toward the man who had been waiting half an hour. It was no more than five yards to the porch of his small cottage. Once the barracks were knocked down, his view was guaranteed to improve significantly.

Hardy was good at tolerating the stench of corpses. Maybe because he was taller and towered over the worst of it, or maybe because his sense of smell was decidedly less acute than most people’s. This time the odor was especially bad.

“Damn, what a stink,” Carl grunted, as they stood in the hallway, pulling on the blue plastic booties.

“I’ll open a window,” said Hardy, stepping into the room next to the claustrophobic entrance.

Carl went over to the doorway leading to the small living room. Not much light was coming through the blinds that had been pulled down, but there was enough to see the figure sitting in the corner with the grayish-green skin and deep fissures in the blisters that covered most of his face. Reddish fluid trickled from his nose, and the buttons of his shirt were threatening to pop off from the pressure of the swollen torso. His eyes were like wax.

“The nail was fired into the head with a Paslode pneumatic framing nailer,” said Hardy from behind. “It’s lying on the table in the next room. There’s also a power screwdriver, and it’s still charged. Remind me that we need to find out how long it can lie around before it needs recharging.”

They’d been standing there surveying the scene for only a moment when Anker joined them.

“The neighbor has lived out here since January sixteenth,” he said. “So that’s ten days, and he hasn’t seen the deceased come out of the house even once.” He pointed to the body and looked around the room. “The neighbor was sitting outside on his porch, enjoying the global warming, and that’s when he noticed the smell. He’s really shaken up, the poor man. Maybe we should get the medical officer to take a look at him after he examines the body.”

Later Carl was only able to provide a very sketchy description of what happened next, and the top brass would just have to make do with that. According to most people, he hadn’t been fully conscious anyway. But that wasn’t true. He actually remembered all too well what occurred. He just didn’t feel like going into detail.

He’d heard someone come in the kitchen door, but he hadn’t reacted. Maybe it was the stench, maybe he thought it was the crime-scene techs arriving.

A few seconds later, out of the corner of his eye, he registered a figure wearing a red-checked shirt who launched himself forward into the room. Carl thought that he should draw his weapon, but didn’t. His reflexes failed him. On the other hand, he did notice the shock waves when the first shot struck Hardy in the back so that he fell, pulling Carl down and trapping him underneath. The enormous pressure of Hardy’s bullet-pierced body wrenched Carl’s spine hard to one side and jammed his knee.

Then came the shots that struck Anker in the chest and Carl in the temple. He recalled with great clarity how he lay there with a frantically hyperventilating Hardy on top of him, and how Hardy’s blood seeped out through the coverall to mix with his own on the floor beneath them. And as the perpetrators’ legs moved past him, he kept thinking he better get hold of his gun.

Behind him, Anker was lying on the floor, trying to wriggle his body around as the assailants talked to each other in the small room beyond the entrance. Only a few seconds passed before they were back in the living room. Carl heard Anker ordering them to halt. Later he found out that Anker had drawn his gun.

The reply to Anker’s command was yet another shot, which shook the floor and struck Anker right in the heart.

That’s all the time it took. The shooters slipped out the kitchen door, and Carl didn’t move. He lay there totally motionless. Not even when the ME arrived did he give any sign of life. Later both the ME and the homicide chief said that at first they thought Carl was dead.

Carl lay there a long time, as if he’d fainted, with his head full of desperate thoughts. They took his pulse and then drove off with him and his two partners. Only at the hospital did he open his eyes. They told him that his eyes had a dead look to them.

They thought it was the shock, but it was from shame.

“Can I help you with something?” asked a man in his mid-thirties wearing a white coat.

Carl stopped leaning on the wall. “I’ve just been in to see Hardy Henningsen.”

“Hardy, yes. Are you a family member?”

“No, I’m his colleague. I was Hardy’s team leader in the homicide division.”

“I see.”

“What’s Hardy’s prognosis? Will he be able to walk again?”

The young doctor made a barely perceptible move away. The answer was clear. The state of his patient’s health was none of Carl’s business. “I’m afraid I can’t give out information to anyone other than his family. I’m sure you understand.”

Carl grabbed the doctor’s sleeve. “I was with him when it happened, do you understand that? I was shot too. One of our colleagues was killed. We were in it together, so that’s why I’d like to know. Is he going to be able to walk again? Can you tell me that?”

“I’m sorry.” He brushed off Carl’s hand. “I can’t give you that information, but in your line of work I’m sure you’ll be able to find out. Each of us has to do our job as we see fit.”

That little note of authority acquired by all physicians, the measured enunciation of vowels on the tip of the tongue, and the slightly raised eyebrows were all to be expected, but they still felt like gasoline poured over Carl’s process of spontaneous ignition. He could have knocked the doctor upside the head, but instead he chose to seize him by the collar and yank him forward. “Do our job?” he snarled. “You’d better watch that smarmy suburban mug of yours before you get too full of yourself, pal. Get it?” He tightened his grip on the man’s collar, and the doctor started to look frantic. “When your daughter doesn’t come home at ten o’clock, we’re the ones who go out looking for her; and when your wife is raped or your shitty beige-colored BMW is missing from the parking lot, we’re the ones you call. We show up every time, even if it’s only to offer consolation. Get it, you asshole? So I’m going to ask you one more time: Will Hardy be able to walk again?”

The doctor breathed in big gulps of air when Carl let go of his collar. “I drive a Mercedes,” he said, “and I’m not married.” Mørck could see it in the white-coat man’s eyes. He thought he’d figured out the state Carl was in. Presumably something he’d learned in a psychology course that he’d squeezed in between anatomy lectures. “A smattering of humor usually defuses the situation” was what he’d apparently been taught, but it didn’t work on Carl.

“Why don’t you toddle off to the minister of health and learn what real arrogance is like, you little shit,” Carl said as he shoved the doctor aside. “You’re just a novice.”

They were waiting for him in his office, both Marcus Jacobsen, the chief of homicide, and that idiot Lars Bjørn. An unsettling sign that the doctor’s cries for help had already been heard outside the thick walls of the clinic. Carl studied the two men for a moment. No, it looked instead as if some lunatic impulse had invaded their bureaucratic brains. He caught them exchanging glances. Or did the situation smell more of some sort of crisis intervention? Was he once again going to be forced to talk with a psychologist about how to understand and combat post-traumatic stress? Could he expect yet another man with deep-set eyes to appear and try to force his way into Carl’s dark nooks and crannies, so he could unveil what had been told and what had not? They might as well stop wasting their time, because Carl knew better. It was impossible to talk his way out of this problem. It had been coming on for a long time, but the incident out on Amager had pushed him over the edge.

They could all kiss his ass.

“Well, Carl,” said Jacobsen, motioning with his head toward his empty chair. “Lars and I have been discussing your situation, and in many respects we think we’ve arrived at a parting of ways.”

Now it sounded like he was going to be fired. Carl began drumming his fingernails on the edge of the desk as he stared over his boss’s head. They wanted to fire him? Well, he wasn’t going to make it easy for them.

Carl looked beyond Tivoli Gardens, up at the clouds that were gathering and threatening the city. If they fired him, he would leave before the rain started pissing down. He wouldn’t bother chasing after the union rep. He would go straight over to the union office on H. C. Andersen Boulevard. Fire a good colleague a mere week after he returned from sick leave and only a few weeks after he was shot and lost two good teammates? They couldn’t do that to him. The world’s oldest police union was just going to have to show that it was worthy in its old age.

“I realize that this is a bit sudden for you, Carl. But we’ve decided to give you a slight change of air, and in a manner that will allow us to make better use of your excellent abilities as a detective. To put it simply, we’re going to promote you to department head of a new division, Department Q. Its goal will be to investigate cases that have been shelved, but are of particular interest to the public welfare. Cases deserving special scrutiny, you might say.”

I’ll be damned, thought Carl, tilting his chair back.

“You’re going to have to run the department alone, but who would be better at it than you?”

“Just about anybody,” he replied, staring at the wall.

“Now listen here, Carl. You’ve been through a tough time, and this job is custom-made for you,” the deputy said.

What the hell do you know about it, you bugger? thought Carl.

“You’ll be running the show entirely on your own. We’ll select a number of cases in consultation with various district police commissioners, and then you can prioritize how to handle them and what procedures to use. You’ll have an expense account for travel; we just need a monthly report,” added his boss.

Carl frowned. “District police commissioners? Is that what you said?”

“Yes, this is a nationwide jurisdiction. Which is why you can no longer be on the same team with your former colleagues. We’ve set up a new department here at headquarters, but it will be a separate entity. Your office is being furnished at this very moment.”

Clever move. Now they won’t have to listen to my bitching anymore, thought Carl. But what he said was: “Is that right? And where is this office located, if I may ask? Are you thinking of giving me yours?”

Now his boss’s smile looked a bit embarrassed. “Where your office is located? Well, for the time being it’s in the basement, but we may be able to change that later on. Let’s see how things go first. If the percentage of cases you solve is even halfway decent, who knows what might happen.”

Carl once again turned his gaze to the clouds. In the basement, they said. So that was the plan. They were going to wear him down. They would toss him a few bones, freeze him out, isolate him, and make sure he was depressed. As if it made any difference whether that was done up here or down below. He was still going to do exactly what he wanted to. Which was, as much as possible, absolutely nothing.

“How is Hardy doing, by the way?” Jacobsen asked after a suitable pause.

Carl shifted his gaze back to his boss. It was the first time he’d ever asked that question.

In the evening Merete Lynggaard
was her real self. With every white line that whipped beneath her car on the way home, she discarded a part of herself that didn’t fit in with life behind the yew trees in Magleby. She felt transformed the instant she turned toward the sleepy expanses of Stevns and crossed the bridge over the Tryggevælde River.

Uffe was sitting there as usual, a cup of cold tea on the edge of the coffee table in front of him, bathed in the light from the TV, with the volume turned up full blast. After she parked the car in the garage and walked around to the back door, she could clearly see him through the windows facing the courtyard. Always the same Uffe. Silent and motionless.

She kicked off her high heels in the utility room, dumped her briefcase on top of the furnace, hung up her coat in the entrance hall, and left all her papers in her office. Then she took off her Filippa K. trouser suit, placed it on the chair next to the washing machine, took down her dressing gown from its hook, and put on her slippers. Everything was exactly as it should be. She wasn’t the type who needed to wash off the day under the shower as soon as she stepped in the door.

Then she rummaged in the plastic bag and found the Hopjes sweets at the bottom. Only when the candy lay on her tongue and raised her blood sugar was she ready to turn her attention to the living room.

It wasn’t until then that she shouted: “Hi, Uffe! I’m home now.” Always the same ritual. She knew that Uffe had seen the headlights of her car the second she drove up the hill, but neither of them had a need for contact until the time was right.